| |
BOOK REVIEW
Lament for Kashmir's
paradise lost
Tiger Ladies: A
Memoir of Kashmir, by Sudha Koul
Reviewed by Ranjit Devraj
 NEW DELHI -
Sudha Koul's book Tiger Ladies is more than a
simple "memoir" of Kashmir as she calls it in the
subtitle - it is the literary encapsulation of the
tragedy of a hauntingly beautiful territory high in the
Himalayas, whose Muslim and Hindu inhabitants have been
torn asunder by the greed of others.
Kashmir,
according to Pakistan's present military ruler, General
Pervez Musharraf, is the "unfinished business of the
partition", under which Britain's former empire in India
was violently torn into two countries on the basis of
religion.
Pakistan's attempts to gain control
over Kashmir since 1947 have been through a mix of
pitting its army against India's far bigger armed
forces, as well as through the use of irregulars - first
as kabailis or fierce Afghan marauders bent on
plunder and rape, and in more recent times as jihadi or
religious fighters armed with automatic weapons.
Koul, a Kashmiri Hindu, describes how the
kabailis were driven back by resistance put up by
both Hindu and Muslim Kashmiris when they invaded the
valley in 1947, forcing the Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh,
who had wanted to remain neutral, to accede to India for
sheer safety.
Koul, who was born in that
momentous year, was later told by her doting grandmother
that the kabailis came "hunting infidels and
treasures and beautiful women".
Like other
Hindus who lived in the valley, Koul and her family were
taken into the homes of their Muslim neighbors and
hidden at great risk. "I am in my mother's belly and she
is also hiding in the dark, waiting for deliverance with
the rest of the family."
Help arrives in time in
planeloads of the Indian army. "The kabailis are
sent back without any carpets, infidels or beautiful
women, but they do manage to extricate an odd gold tooth
or two pulled out of the mouths of some hapless Irish
nuns they attacked at a rural outpost of the order,"
Koul writes.
But the conflict only began with
the beating back of the kabailis. Pakistan and
India were to fight open wars over the territory,
carving it up into two halves separated by the Line of
Control (LoC) or ceasefire line. It is not very well
known, but Kashmir became embroiled in the Afghan war by
the mujahideen to evict the Soviets in the eighties.
As Koul puts it, "Within a short time Kashmir
also started deconstructing at an incomprehensible speed
and the violence there became a regular part of the
news. The valley was saturated with Kalashnikov rifles,
smuggled surplus from Afghanistan and every other young
Kashmiri was a militant."
Koul blames the Indian
government, in which she served briefly as a ranking
administrative officer, for its ham-handed handling of
the problem. "There are so many examples of
mismanagement, humiliation and short-sightedness by the
Indian government that that even sympathetic Kashmiri
Muslims are disgusted."
In the process the trust
that long existed between Kashmir Muslims and Hindus,
cemented by intertwining traditions and the worship of
common saints, is shattered - perhaps forever as the
Hindus flee the valley and their homes are looted and
destroyed by fundamentalists.
For Koul, that
tragedy is best represented by Fatha the fishwife who
brought fresh fish to her doorstep but was nearly driven
insane by the fate of her son, who joined the militants
and paid for it by being tortured to within an inch of
his life by police. "The old city is full of foreigners
who do not speak Kashmiri. We cannot see them; they only
reveal themselves to our boys like angels of doom," Koul
was informed by Fatha.
Essentially, Tiger
Ladies tells the story of Kashmir through the
experiences of ordinary women like Fatha. It also tells
the story of the women of Koul's own family, spread
across three generations and the saints and goddesses
they worshipped - in particular the goddess that rides a
tiger and who has her temple in Jammu, just outside the
valley.
It also affords a peep into the culture
of Kashmir through the extraordinarily rich folk
traditions of a region that is unique in South Asia and
now seriously threatened by Islamic extremism and by the
attempts to counter it by the Indian army.
But
more than anything else, the book is the story of
Kashmiri Hindus or the Pandits, and the loss of the
homeland in which they were highly respected. It is
about the loss of innocence and of paradise as
represented by growing up in a large extended family
with small but meaningful comforts.
Among these
could be the kangri (the small pot of glowing
coals worn by all Kashmiris to stay warm) to a large,
loving extended family and the legends, folklore, rites
and rituals they are repository to. But there is a sense
that all this worked only in the enchanted valley of
Kashmir, now often described as the most dangerous place
in the world because both Pakistan and India are ready
to use nuclear weapons rather than part with it.
Koul herself explains the agony of her own exile
in New Jersey through her mother-in-law's thoughts as
she lay in her deathbed in a hospital in Buffalo - the
only relief coming from the fact that the doctors there
were Kashmiris, both Hindu and Muslim.
"They
[the doctors] called her 'mother' because she loved them
like her own sons and daughters. I suspect that to them
as to us, she was a relic from a golden time in
Kashmir," Koul writes.
Tiger Ladies: A
Memoir of Kashmir, by Sudha Koul, Beacon Press,
May 2002. ISBN 0807059188. Price US$24.00, 224 pages
(Inter Press
Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
